Many of the conditioner products in the market today work to deliver benefits to hair by depositing benefit agents such as perfumes and conditioning agents onto the hair during conditioning. As a result, there is a desire to maximize the effectiveness of such benefit agents by increasing their delivery and retention onto hair. One method of achieving this objective is to encapsulate such benefit agents in microcapsules. While these microcapsules are able to encapsulate a wide variety of benefit agents and deliver them to hair, it is still difficult to improve the retention and delivery efficiencies of such benefit agents. Such agents may be lost due to the agents' physical or chemical characteristics, may be washed off of the hair during conditioning, or may be incompatible with other compositional components already on the hair. Consumers today desire conditioning compositions that deposit and retain encapsulated benefit agents onto hair even after an extended period of time.
One known method for improving the deposition of microcapsules onto hair during treatment involves the use of certain cationic deposition polymers. However, this alone does not necessarily ensure adequate deposition of microcapsules onto hair.
Accordingly, there is a need for a conditioner composition that provides an increased deposition of encapsulated benefit agents onto hair. In addition, there is a need for a polymer system that associates with microcapsule surfaces, and that when sheared, allows the encapsulated benefit agents to be released. Furthermore, there is a need for a conditioner composition that provides an increased retention of encapsulated benefit agents onto the hair for an extended period of time.